The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, communications and broadcast services. Market demands for such spacecraft have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on spacecraft payloads. For example, broadband service providers desire spacecraft with increased data rate capacity at higher EIRP through each of an increased number of user spot beans.
To meet the more stringent demands, a spacecraft capable of providing at least 200 Gbps total data bandwidth distributed across at least one hundred spot beams is desirable. A payload architecture appropriate to such a demand may be required to accommodate feeder links at Q or V band frequencies (33-75 GHz) and user links at Ka band (17-31 GHz). The payload, desirably, should provide an aggregate effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) in the forward direction of greater than 80 dBw. Meeting the foregoing performance objectives with a conventional payload architecture implies the use of a complex and heavy network of payload interconnection hardware.
Thus, there is a need for a high power broadband spacecraft with an improved payload architecture.